Introducing Photo Annotations

December 13, 2018 by Bryan McBride

Over the past several months, the Fulcrum engineering team has been hard at work building out a completely custom image annotation engine from the ground up. This initiative provides a solid foundation for some exciting new features, the first of which we are excited to announce today: Photo annotations are now available on all Professional and Enterprise plans!

The new photo annotation feature allows users to sketch graphics and add text stamps on top of photos, without ever having to leave the Fulcrum app! This new functionality enables data collectors to quickly call out features of interest directly on photos immediately after they have been snapped in the field.

Working with Photo Annotations

If your Fulcrum plan supports annotations, there will be an additional setting for photo fields in the app designer to Enable Annotations for that field. This allows administrators building apps to explicitly decide which photo fields have annotations enabled.

For photo fields where annotations are enabled, mobile users will have the option to annotate the photo after it has been attached to the record.

While the implementations vary slightly, the latest Fulcrum releases for Android (2.29.0) and iOS (2.18.1) support annotations. Step-by-step guides have been developed for both Android and iOS.

Note that saving photo annotations will overwrite the original photo with the annotated photo, while retaining the original photo’s EXIF attributes, including any geographic information. If you want to retain the original photo and attach it again, make sure to enable saving to the camera roll/gallery.

We hope you enjoy the new feature, and would love to see what you do with it! Tweet your annotated photos to us @fulcrumapp!

Fulcrum is a data collection platform that enables businesses to reduce costs, access critical data in real time, and improve decision making at every level. With Fulcrum, you can create custom apps using our simple drag-and-drop builder to turn your paper documents into digital forms that your field teams can quickly complete on mobile devices.

About the author

Bryan is our Product Manager for Fulcrum. He works to identify new markets and features in which to grow the platform.